Beastchild

Chapter Fifteen

In a glass bubble laced through with fire, the gnome danced, its feet snarled in filaments of spun milk, millions of puppet strings stretching away from it into invisibility. The creature was no larger than a man's hand, but fired with the energy of multitudes. It spun and waltzed and jigged with itself, flailing its tiny arms about, leaping and frolicking this way and that until the transparent walls of its prison made it turn and twirl in a new path. As it cavorted, it cackled and gibbered, laughed at its own gems of humor, spoken in a tongue of nonsense and folly.

The glass ball spun slowly, slowly, as if the gnome were upon a revolving stage.

He danced more furiously than ever to a music that did not exist. He laughed and cackled and whooped explosively, stomping his tiny feet hard against the inside of his prison. He began to whirl, standing on his toes like a ballet dancer, faster and faster, his feet stamping smartly in a tight circle. His face flushed, and perspiration rolled out of his flesh, beaded on his miniature forehead, trickled down his doll's face. Still, he moved at an increasing pace until he was all but a whirl.

Then his flesh began to grow soft. His facial features melted and ran together. He no longer had a nose or mouth. His eyes flashed and dribbled down his face

He did not slow his pace. From deep within him, the sound of his manic laughter continued-though the lack of a mouth denied the sound full egress. He bobbled, bounced, weaved, his smooth whirl becoming more erratic as his feet and legs began to fuse and obliterate the ankles.

The glass sphere filled with licking green flames to replace the warm orange tongues that had been there.

His arm fused with his side and ceased to exist, except for a thumb which stuck out just below his last rib. A moment later, the second arm disappeared as well.

The emerald fire became all-consuming: the gnome was reduced to a thick pudding within the glass, a semi-living jell that gurgled and sloshed against the sides of the small sphere and was, at last, silent

The Isolator regarded the glass ball, juggling it on fingers of pure force. It began to shape the jell into another figure, but suddenly felt a wave of depression wash through it, battering the foundations of its being. It dropped the glass ball and watched the trinket splash down into the pool of its own temporal mass. It digested the thing and waited

Waiting had been what the naoli had designed it for- waiting and destroying. But there had been so little of the latter and so much of the former since the war had been won that the Isolator craved activity (and tried to satisfy the longing through toys like the gnome). Perhaps, the Isolator mused, it was not wise to build weapons which were alive. Did their designers know how bored a thinking weapon could get-when it had been designed only to think about its job and its job had become obsolete?

Then it ceased to think about that. The naoli had made certain that the Isolator could not think about itself, as an entity, for more than a few seconds at a time. In that manner, they could be certain it would never get ideas of its own beyond those programmed into it The Isolator, gurgling within the huge vat that contained it, raised its alert to red station and began checking the monitoring posts in the outlying areas. Its pseudopods of plastic flesh thinned into two molecule thicknesses and pressed through the vat, beyond the Isolator station and into the warm sands of Earth's desert. In a moment, it had formed a net beneath the land for a thousand feet in every direction. Such first-hand data gathering was senseless when its mechanical aides could assist so dependably, but the only way to defeat the boredom was to do something.

It pulsated beneath the sand, fifty percent of its body withdrawn from the subterranean vat. It wished it could go further and explore the surrounding terrain. But its physical bulk could not extend more than these thousand feet from the vat. It was not truly mobile. It was only a thing, not an individual, no matter how much it tried to bridge the gap into full awareness.

A thing, nothing more.

But a very efficient thing.

The harsh sting of the alarms sliced through the Isolator from the monitors in the station. Quickly, it withdrew from the sand, back into the vat. It formed an eyeball of a thousand facets and examined the three-" dimensional vision on the bank of screens on the station's second level. For the first time in months, it knew excitement. It almost rushed the majority of its bulk through the wall into the screen room and managed to check itself just a hair this side of disaster (at least half of the Isolator must remain within the nurturing vat at all times). There, on the screen, was a floating shuttlecraft, fluttering along the sand, stirring clouds of dust in its wake. It had not issued the recognition signal; any naoli would have done that. Which meant it was more than likely a human

The Isolator tapped one of the monitoring posts which the shuttlecraft was approaching, released a spy-bee from the distant outpost's storage unit. As the bee spun out across the desert, the Isolator guided it, watching what the mechanical insect saw as the images were projected on the largest of the screens. In moments, the shuttlecraft appeared in a swirl of sand. He directed the spy-bee directly at it, toward the windscreen. The mite passed through the whirl of dust, shot across the hood of the vehicle, then hovered inches from the window. Beyond the screen, a naoli sat at the wheel, peering ahead at the shimmering heat blankets rising from the sands.

The Isolator felt despair as it looked at the lizard face. It was about to destroy the spy-bee and return, its attention to the making of gnomes and other baubles when it thought to turn the bee's attention on the passenger's seat. And there, of course, was the boy, Leo.

There was no more time for gnomes.

Within the vat, the Isolator rejoiced. It heaved upward in a great, joyous surge, pushing stickily against the cap of the vat which it could have penetrated had it wanted. It splashed down into itself, then ceased its celebration and turned to the chore at hand.

It had killing to do.

"Look at this, Hulann," Leo said, leaning forward in his seat, straining against the automatic belt that held him.

Hulann shifted his eyes from the terrain ahead. It was not necessary to watch the path so cautiously in a shuttle-craft, and he had only been using that as an excuse to avoid conversation and let his mind race through the plethora of new data it had accumulated in such a short period of time. It was good, now, to give his eyes a rest. "Look at what?"

"Out the window. A mud wasp," the boy said.

Hulann looked, and when he could not spot it immediately, asked the boy to show him.

Leo leaned even farther forward, pressing a finger against the glass toward the hovering wasp. "How can it do that? "he asked.

Hulann looked, found the mud wasp, and felt his scalp tighten painfully as fear gripped him, squeezed him, and nearly voided his lungs of air.

"How can it do that?" Leo repeated.. "It's flying against us, yet it's standing still."

"A machine," Hulann explained.

"Machine?"

"A naoli weapon," Hulann said, gripping the wheel, his eyes riveted to the electronic mite hovering before them. "Or, rather, a scout for a weapons system. The thing directing it is called a Region Isolator."

Leo frowned, made slits of his eyes. "I've heard about them. But no one really knows what they do. No one has ever gotten close enough to find out"

"I know. The Isolator is deadly. It is also expensive and prohibits mass production because of the time involved in structuring one. They were used sparingly in the war-or it would have all been over much sooner than it was."

"What is it?"

"The Isolator itself is a huge mass of large cells with oval nuclei that require the bulk of the cell shell. The overall mass must be as large or larger than one of your houses."

Leo made an appropriate whistle of appreciation.

"Of its billions of component parts, each is identical to the last. This lack of cellular diversification and specialization is possible because every cell of the creature is capable of life without relying on the others and contains all life processes within its cell wall."

"It sounds like one large amoeba made up of millions of smaller amoeba," Leo said.

"Somewhat. But it has other powers-which contribute to its effectiveness as a weapon."

"Such as?" Leo asked.

"The Isolator was created through the same techniques used to develop the Hunters, through gene juggling and careful genetic engineering, though the subject was not a human foetus this time. It was, instead, a small jelly fish of my home world, an animal that had exhibited rudimentary intelligence and the capacity to learn. The genetic engineers worked from there, and rumor has it that the project required more than three hundred years. It was begun during a past war the naoli was engaged in and was not completed in time to be used in that conflict, was not completed until this new war had broken out between our peoples.

"The Isolator has been imbued with a-a Proteus power. It is able to assume any form it wishes. It can use its mass to break off parts and form organic weapons. And if it wants, it can have that organic weapon reproduce itself on and on. It is a genetic engineer, using its own mass to make its children. And it is intelligent, not just a machine-like being. Not like you or I, of course, but clever enough to out-think us."

"It doesn't sound good," Leo said.

"It isn't."

"You aren't giving up, are you?"

"No."

Leo grabbed Hulann's heavy biceps and squeezed, grinned at the scaly naoli. Hulann grinned back, though he did not much feel in the mood for such a pleasantry.

The spy-bee ceased to hover and snapped against the windscreen, shattering into dozens of little bits and leaving a chip on the plastiglass.

"It broke! "Leo said.

"The Isolator ordered it to destruction," Hulann corrected hint "But why?"

"Don't get your hopes up," the alien said, pulling his lips back from his teeth, baring the gleaming points, his four nostrils flared and his eyes wide and cautious. "If the Isolator has destroyed the bee, that can only mean that it is already sending a weapon for us and does not need the little mechanical monitor any longer."

"Oh," Leo said. He crouched a little deeper into his chair, watching the sky which had begun to cloud over with low, gray blankets of mist like a burnished steel bowl laid over the world. He searched the flat stretches of sand in all directions, peering intently through wavering fingers of hot air that sought to delude him. "I don't see anything," he said at last.

"You won't," Hulann said. "It will come too quickly for that."

"What can we do?"

"Wait"

"There must be something more!"

"We can drive," Hulann said. "We can make this shut-tlecraft move as swiftly as it can. The Isolator only covers an area of a hundred or two hundred miles square, depending on the model. If we drive fast and long enough, we should escape its territory-though I have never heard of anyone escaping an Isolator."

"That's pessimism," Leo said.

"That's right," the alien agreed.

There was dark sky.

And sand.

And something else on its way, something they could not define or imagine until it was upon them

Within the vat, the independent cells of the Isolator worked together according to the dictates of their group consciousness. It was true, as Hulann had told the boy, that each individual cell was perfectly capable of sustaining life on its own. But the intelligence of the beast was a conglomerate one. And all the cells had been programmed, by the naoli engineers, to respect the need for group action above the natural urge and ability of each particle to separate itself and exist in isolation.

The mother mass burbled contentedly, like a fat baby chuckling deeply in its throat, lying there in the bottom of the vat, contemplating its catalogue of destructive devices and employing its limited but genuine imagination to modify the catalogue items to make them even more deadly than they had been intended. It was an amber jelly now, shot through with streaks of green as bright as newly mown grass and blotted with patches of gray as the cells combined to function in various specialized fashions at least through this moment of crisis when every resource had to be called upon and used.

If anyone had been within the vat, he would have been repelled by the odor: the smell of death and decay, even though things were being born-not dying. It emanated from the flesh of the Isolator and clung to the warm, metal walls like a film of grease. It was generated by the heat which was, in turn, generated by the intricate and exhausting processes of creation which the mother mass was employing to develop its weaponry.

Deep in the mechanical works of the complex, around the vat itself, the food constructors and dispensers increased the supply of liquid protein that was fed into the bottom of the vat where the mother mass absorbed and digested it almost instantly, each cell taking what it required and passing the rest on in a form of high-speed osmosis unmatched by any earthly plant. The machines, to obtain the higher demand for food on the part of the creature they were created to serve, opened the surface receptors of the ingestion plant and collected more sand, rock, weed, and cactus for conversion into liquid protein, at the same time obtaining water from underground pools which other systems siphoned upwards into the humming works of the station.

The smooth surface of the amoeboid mass churned like pudding stirred from beneath by a beater. The thin tension cracked as an arm of the jell soared upwards toward the roof of the vat, waving lazily in the darkness and the steamy mists that now rose from the main body of the Isolator. The hand-like ball at the end of the "arm" broke free and continued to soar upward, as if it were lighter than air. As it rose, rolling slowly, slowly, it began to lengthen from a sphereoid into a streamlined form in the fashion of a knife, though a great deal larger. From either side, thin membranes spread outward to help it ride on the mists. These wings were more in the nature of the appendages of a bat than of the feathered limbs of a bird. They flapped wetly, cracking in the confines of the great tank.

Birth had been given.

Slowly, the creature took on features as the mother body smoothed its work. The face was thin, wicked, and marked with two deep eyes with cataracted blue-white surfaces that see in all ranges of light. Through these, the mother mass in the vat would see all that the "child" saw. The beak was long and horny, razor-edged. The small, reptilian hands that grew from beneath it were tipped with sharp, impressively lengthy claws.

The mother mass burbled happily again.

The bat thing flew to the side of the tank, crystalline eyes glittering despite the fact there was no light within the subterranean chamber, and attached itself to the warm metal wall "after growing suction caps on the rounded bulge of its belly. Quietly, efficiently, it began to lose its form, to congeal into the amber-green-gray jelly once more. In moments, it had melted through the wall of the chamber, its own molecules juggling through the molecules of the metal, onward into the sands of this alien earth. It rose through the loosely packed soil and broke the surface, puddling on the ground above, shapeless, quivering to begin. When all of the thing had exited the station and the presence of the mother mass, it swiftly regained the bat-like form once again, much like a chunk of memory plastic returning to its structured form after being battered out of shape.

It spread its wings. It flapped them experimentally.

In the light of day, it seemed almost as much a vulture as a bat, though greatly larger than either of those things.

It threw its neck back and screeched. The sound echoed across the flatland and sent rabbits scurrying into burrows.

The cataracted eyes looked at the sun, at the blue sky. Without a moment's more hesitation, it rose from the dull earth with the speed of a bullet fired from a gun and sought out its prey with an inhuman relish for destruction, for destruction was its purpose and it had to meet its purpose if it were to have any meaning for existence

Hulann was conscious of the descending beast only a split second before the monstrous thing swept over the roof of the shuttlecraft at such a speed that the air currents of its passage ripped the wheel from his hands and sent the car careening across the desert, off the rugged but reliable path of the highway. There was a movement, an immense shadow, then the moan of its passage and the heavy turbulence in its wake. The shuttlecraft spun in a complete circle, its rotors whining as sand was kicked up into them and threatened to foul the system.

Leo grabbed the dash against which he was hurtled, then wheezed as the belt caught him at the last instant, jerking him viciously backwards against the seat. His vision blurred for a moment, and he felt like a man falling in weightlessness, unsure of his directions, unable to tell up from down and left from right.

Hulann grabbed the wheel, but another blast from the beast's wake shook them, spun the wheel the opposite direction, scraping his hands rudely as he grappled for control.

Sand hissed across the windscreen.

The craft hobbled dangerously, tilting back and forth, the rim brushing along the surface of the dunes that undulated gently toward the distant mountains. If the blades struck those dunes, there was nothing but disaster for them.

"So big!" Leo finally managed to gasp.

Hulann had the wheel now, gripping it firmly in all twelve fingers, hunched over it like a race driver or as if he thought he could mesh with it and thus make it impossible for the thing to be pulled loose of him. "It is smaller than I expected."

Before either of them could say more, the Isolator fragment swept back at them streaked only feet above the shuttlecraft roof again. It was as large as a two passenger aircraft, three times the size of their car. Again, its wake struck them like a wave of water, bounced them sideways, the heaving wheeling wrenching back and forth. Hulann managed to hold it this time, having been prepared for the attack, but having possession of it did little good. The wind thrust the car where it wished regardless of what his hands commanded the wheel to perform.

The shuttlecraft slid sideways through a cactus, smashing the growth into dozens of pulpy pieces. The watery sap splattered over the craft, streaking the window. Instantly, the whirling sand stuck to the fluid and opaqued the window.

Frantically, Hulann sought to reach the windscreen washer and wipers, but the jerking of the craft kept tossing him away from the dash. If he couldn't get the window cleaned, he wouldn't be able to see to steer when the wind died-and that would be deadly

Abruptly, even that problem seemed academic as the bat thing zoomed back, crossing from side-to-side this time, and the car was sent on an even wilder, more dangerous careening plunge across the sand.

There was a jarring thud as they struck something more solid than a cactus. The frame of the shuttlecraft rang like a bell, and the rear window on Leo's side smashed into countless fragments of glittering plastiglass. They rebounded and were carried elsewhere on their nightmare ride.

Hulann expected the beast to collide with them at any moment. It could not kill itself. It was part of the mother mass of the Isolator-and, therefore, immortal. It could ram the shuttlecraft head-on, totally demolishing it and turning the two of them into blood jelly already packed neatly in the can. Why it had not already done this, he could not fathom; but he gritted his teeth, waiting for it.

The roar of wind died and the craft began to stabilize again. While movement was possible, Hulann leaned forward, turned on the washers and wipers and watched as the thick coating of sand and watery sap were sluiced away. As visibility returned, he saw they were cruising toward a thrust of weathered rock five hundred feet high and at least a mile long.

"Hulann!" Leo shouted.

But he didn't need advice. He threw all of his weight into the wheel, brought the car around in the last moment before impact.

The side of their craft, as they made the nerve-shattering turn, scraped the rock wall; they drove along the cliffside for more than a thousand feet while Hulann fought to keep them from total disaster and to get them back onto open land. The metal whined and squealed much as if it were alive. Sparks leaped up the stone walls and danced against the plastiglass only inches from Leo's face.

The rock passed so swiftly that it had no form and registered only as a gray-brown swath of moving color. Pieces of it snapped loudly and broke away. The exterior doorhandle on that side exploded away as the bolts and rivets refused to meet the strain.

The seatbelts kept them from being thrown forward into the windows, but they did nothing to counteract the up and down motion of the car as it bucked and kicked like a wild horse under them. Leo's head bounced off the ceiling, and as he reached up to rub the sore spot, he saw Hulann was taking worse blows than that since his greater height required less of a bounce to bring him into contact with the roof.

Then they were away from the rock wall, though still following it, and a semblance of sanity and safety returned.

"Where is it?" Leo asked.

Hulann scanned the sky, discovered the bird to their left, out in the open desert, flying fairly low and slowly along the parched earth. He pointed to it, then put his mind back to driving.

"Why doesn't it attack?" the boy asked, craning his neck to get a good look at the behemoth where it soared along the ground, rushing toward them with great wings flapping like blankets. It was watching them-or at least it had its milky blue-white eyes turned in their approximate direction-but its intent was unclear.

"I don't know," Hulann said. "I would feel much better if I did."

"Do we have a weapon?"

"Nothing."

Leo shrugged. "I guess not much would be of use against it anyway."

They drove on.

The rock fled by on their right.

The bat thing paralleled them on their left, moving in, closing the gap, but with less purpose than it had previously shown.

Hulann dared to hope that the sluggishness of the brute meant that they were near the border of the Isolator's influence and that they would soon break free into an area where it could not approach them.

But that was soon proven to be a false hope when the creature screeched a reverberating war cry that danced along the dry earth and rebounded from the rocks. A moment after the ear-piercing scream, it turned more directly toward them, paralleling them less, and swept in for the final kill

"Here it comes," Leo said.

Hulann cursed the shuttlecraft, wishing there were some way he could milk more power from it, could push it faster than it wished to go. At the same time, he realized it was futile to try to avoid the beast, for it could summon more energy and more speed than any mechanical construction could ever muster. It transcended machine just as surely as it transcended naoli-at least in the art of destruction.

"Hulann!" Leo cried, grabbing the naoli by the shoulder, urging his attention through the window toward the oncoming bulk of the bat thing. "Look! What's happen-ing?"

Hulann took his eyes from the way ahead and reluctantly looked at the Isolator's weapon. The bird was losing its shape. The wings were shrinking inward while the body was flattening out and losing its streamline shape. The face was mashed flat and the features were rapidly disintegrating-except for the eyes, which seemed only to be shielded behind thick crystal panels now. The clawed hands were gone altogether. In a moment, it had transformed itself from the bat thing into a pulsing mass of plasti-flesh.

And it was going to be carried these last hundred or so feet by its own momentum, was going to crash directly into the shuttlecraft and drive them into the rock wall.

Hulann tramped the accelerator.

There was nothing more in the machine's guts.

The huge ball of the Isolator's flesh crashed into them with a sickeningly soft thud that sent the craft tumbling onto its side, smashing the roof against the rock wall and stalling the blades. The Isolator surged around the machine, a colorful mass of rippling amber and emerald, the gray patches no longer in evidence-or perhaps muted by the sun in favor of the brighter hues.

Though the car was on its side, the seatbelts held them in place and kept Hulann from tumbling down the seat to crush Leo. The alien gripped the wheel, his body wracked with convulsive spasms of nervous shivering as the inhuman beast beyond the windscreen sought entrance. "Are you all right?" he called out. There was little light in the craft, for the Isolator blocked the direct sun. Only an orange-tinted luminance penetrated its flesh and flushed dimly upon them.

"I'm here," Leo said. "What do we do, Hulann?"

The alien said nothing.

"Does fire hurt it?"

"No."

Leo watched the stuff sliding along the glass, bubbling and gurgling, only an arm's length from them.

"What, then?" he asked Hulann.

"I know of nothing."

"But there must be something we can do!"

Hulann had to fight a tendency for his overmind to withdraw into its nether-world sleep pocket. His body was reacting to the huge amounts of emotional stimulation washing it, and it wanted release from the inundation. Sleep would be very nice… And death

Except for the boy. He had come so far, gone through so much, lost everything that had made up his life to date. Was he now to be undone by something that was the creation of the engineers of his own race? Was there to be no dignity at all connected with this affair?

"Look," Leo said quietly, his voice permeated with a subtle, whispering fear that Hulann understood at once, Along the seam of Hulann's door, the Isolator was pushing its way in, a thin gooey wad of it surging steadily, inexorably into their sanctuary… In the amber light, it was even sort of pretty

Bluebolt thundered along the rails. It was stormy where David now traveled, but he could not hear the thunder. The rails were not in the best condition, corroded dangerously, and the train's own noise cancelled out the uproar of the elements.

He watched the track ahead with interest, but with little fear. If he were to die now, it would not be exceedingly difficult to accept, for he had been living on borrowed time for quite a while.

Lightning flashed in the heavens, streaked downward and touched the earth only several miles distance. The resultant play of shadows on the desert and the rails was lovely. David grinned and relaxed even farther into his chair.

The doors of the French Alpine Hotel stood open, and the snow had found its way inside. It drifted into the great lobby, over a pair of chairs that faced each other over a magazine table. Long white fingers grasped at the rug and clawed toward the plush couches. In the rear of the establishment, the delivery room, behind the kitchen, was as hoary as Methuselah, with great icicles hanging from the waterpipes and a blanket of snow across most of the floor.

Everything was quiet.

In the depths of the place, a pair of cats snuggled in a cellar corner, licking each other, wondering for the thousandth time why there were no guests any more

Docanil the Hunter stood along the highway at the pass out of the desert valley. He had changed clothes to match the weather. Here was no place for a greatcoat He wore a light, porous suit of a fabric that resembled vinyl in appearance and cotton in comfort and to the touch. Between his shoulder blades was the clawed fist ringed with nails. He still wore gloves and boots, for the hands and feet of a Hunter are very sensitive.

"See anything?" Banalog asked from behind.

The Hunter did not respond.

"Perhaps they are already dead," Banalog suggested.

"We will soon go in," the Hunter said.

Banalog looked into the long desert beyond the rock pillars that flanked the highway at the end of the valley. He was almost selfish enough to hope that they were already dead. Alive, they might be forced to talk, to inform on him. And then the Hunter-Docanil or another, it hardly mattered-would be coming for him.

The tableau was broken as the lowering skies began to rip open and dump a fine sheet of rain on the thirsting land beneath. Docanil turned and hurried for the copter and the dryness inside. The rain was cold-and a Hunter is a sensitive creature.

High above the Earth, clouds of dust and debris, hurtled into the stratosphere by the nuclear blasts men had touched off in the last hours of the war, shifted and stretched into bands. The long streams of stones, dust, paper, wood chips, pottery shards, and other rubbish would circle the globe for weeks and possibly even months before finally settling onto the scorched surface of the planet from which they had come.

There were pieces of bone, too.

Circling above the earth.

Orbiting.

Slowly coming down again.